Try a little hindsight. This column never got round to warning you not to touch the internet poker share PartyGaming. A rueful apology is due.

Yet with 27 pages of risk factors in the prospectus, a warning hardly seemed necessary.

The company itself noted that it would be unfortunate if the directors went to jail and that its activities might be considered illegal in the States, where nearly all its customers live.

It is a bad idea to make fun of other people's names. But old-fashioned souls might pause a second or two before throwing money at an outfit run by people called Parasol and Dikshit, even if they don't quite know why.

Mrs Parasol, as it happens, made her first fortune in porn websites, an industry where possibly the finer points of corporate governance may have escaped her.

More to the point, she and her four co-owners stood to collect almost £1 billion in cash from the flotation.

This was all evident when the shares came to the market ten weeks ago.

Alarm bells were clanging loud and clear.

Private investors who went for PartyGaming did so with their eyes open. It was - and is - a gambler's share in a novel, offshore gambling company that you could never confidently expect to be as transparent as Hilton, Stanley Leisure or William Hill.

They had a chance to make quick money, too. Launched at 116p, the shares went to 176p. Indeed they still stood at 138p on Monday night before they fell out of bed - and they are still heading for the 100-share Footsie. Even at last night's 106p, this is still a £4 billion company.

There's the rub. You may well be an old-fashioned soul. Even if you are not you may have decided it would be more fun, cheaper - and no more hazardous - to learn the rules of poker and join in PartyGaming's Internet games rather than stake your money on its shares.

Yet in all likelihood you had no choice in the matter. If you belong to a pension scheme, or have what remains of a life assurance policy, or bought PEPs or ISAs in a middle of the road unit trust or OIEC, your fund manager almost certainly did it for you.

If you did what you were told was the safety-first thing and plumped for a UK tracker investment there is no almost about the certainty. This thing was in the All-Share from day one, and with a £4 billion-plus price tag it loomed large in it.

Even an "active" fund manager (one whose fund does not passively track an index) ignores a company of that size at his peril.

If the shares do well for a bit, his fund under-performs the herd and his bonus suffers accordingly. If it happens too often his job is at risk. But nobody gets sacked for being in the middle of the herd.

So the conventional manager just goes "underweight" in companies he knows are rubbish, buys fewer of them than their weighting in the index, but buys some just the same.

That is why you most likely have money in PartyGaming.

There is one great consolation. This is the sort of thing that happens only in a redblooded bull market.